I’m an American so by another culture I mean, well... I wouldn’t consider Adam Roberts foreign, though he’s British. I know there are some (relatively minor) cultural differences despite the fact that we speak and write pretty much the same language. Would I think of Jules Verne as foreign? Probably not. Perhaps for me foreign means non-Western.
I’ve got two recent examples in mind: Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem (2006), Tade Thompson, Rosewater (2016). If you changed obvious non-English and non-Western elements, such as names of people and places, would I have recognized either of these books as coming from a non-Western author? I don’t know. It’s not in the least obvious to me that I would. Oh, if pressed I might be able to make up something that makes one book Nigerian and the other Chinese, but I’d have no confidence in that. They’re both science fiction, and very different kinds of science fiction at that – Three-Body centers on computers and ranges over vast reaches of space and time while Rosewater is set in a two decade span later in this century and reads like a detective story – but it's the SF dominates my sense of either.
Does participation in the culture(s) of science fiction over-ride ethnocentric thematics and resonance? Not necessarily universal, not at all, but cosmopolitan perhaps? Is science fiction an inherently cosmopolitan literary form? Or is it becoming, has become, so?
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And, yes, Thompson is an interesting case. He is a Yoruba who was born in London and his family moved to Nigeria while he was young. He is a native speaker of English. But then Nigeria is like that. Nigerian English is the official language in a country where some 250 peoples live.
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